Comic review: MLP:FiM Micro-series issue #4: Fluttershy

Tony Fleecs's Cover B has a lovely simplicity to it

Look at the title of this blog. That will explain to you why I've been so apprehensive about the appearance of issue #4 of the My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic Micro-series. I've long felt that Fluttershy is the hardest of the Mane Six to write really well, and some very good writers have stumbled at times. This one, which again was bought from Nostalgia & Comics in Birmingham, has been written by Barbara Randall Kesel, who's new to Pony, and illustrated by Tony Fleecs, who drew the Rainbow Dash micro. Past the jump we'll see how well the team did.

Classic episode review: "Applebuck Season" (S1E04)

Who's a sleepy pony? You're a sleepy pony!

Okay, I think it's time for another classic episode review. "Applebuck Season" is the first episode not to carry a writer's credit for Lauren Faust. Nevertheless, some continuity is maintained by having the previous ep's co-writer, Amy Keating Rogers, handling this one. This is seen by many fans as the first good example of the slice-of-life episodes which the show does so often. After the jump, I'll talk about how I see things.

Equestria Girls dolls break cover... or possibly not

I can't decide which is scarier, the arms or the necks

The eagle-eyed Hazzat over on UK of Equestria has spotted that the Russian toy website lillu.ru is advertising dolls as shown above. They're listed as out of stock (Нет на складе) at the moment, which I'd guess means that they haven't yet been released. Their designs are... interesting, though. Note that the dreaded cutie mark face tattoos are back, for one thing. And what has happened to AJ's hat? As for our beloved Fluttershy, she looks like she's contracted jaundice. All right, the FiM brushables don't look much like the show ponies either, but really, Hasbro...

Edit: Ah... Equestria Daily says they're early prototypes, presumably from the same time as the similarly-tattooed cartoon characters. So probably the finished dolls will look a bit less terrifying. Even so, it's amazing that anything looking like this was allowed to see the light of day

Edit 2: Unsurprisingly perhaps, Lauren Faust was not at all happy with the way the EqG girls were portrayed in those dolls.

PonyVid: As a Brony (ACRacebest/BlackGryph0n et al)

As it's a Bank Holiday weekend, I thought today's post should be silly. Admittedly that doesn't make it different from many of my other posts, but hay ho. This is a collaborative venture between ACRacebest (video/lyrics) and BlackGryph0n (vocals) with backup from the "Village People" of BlackGryph0n (again), Saberspark and Dustykatt. As it's practically the law that Rina-chan has to be involved in any well-known brony video, she provides the (small) voice sample for Colgate, who was vectored by ThatsGrotesque.

My thoughts? It's a lot of fun, of course; how could it not be with a song like this? There are one or two places where I think the lyrics have been rather forced to fit the music, and could perhaps have been a bit more elegantly done — the end of the second verse is one example. But still, I'm nit-picking and it doesn't really take away from the cheerful insanity of it all. So give a listen: it's a lot of fun. Or, as the Pinkies would put it: FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN! FUN!

Why capitalise "brony"?

Otherwise known as an "it's Saturday; Logan's too lazy to make a proper post" post. But still... I have to admit that "Brony" looks rather weird to me. I can't decide whether those who do it as a form of empowerment (as some people write Black) or by analogy with other fan descriptors like Trekkie. The latter approach falls down, though, in that Star Trek is clearly a proper noun, so it's reasonable to maintain the capitalisation for "Trekkie" — whereas "brony" is entirely fandom-created and is not a proper noun, so makes more sense in lower case.

The only place I've actually seen this subject discussed is here on MLP Forums, and the associated poll came out roughly 60/40 in favour of the lower-cased spelling. Not, of course, that this actually matters all that much (or indeed at all) but as I said, I can't be bothered to think up anything more significant for today's ramblings. For what it's worth, I always write the word with a lower-case b, and I can't see any reason to change. This post was brought to you by the letter X, because I'm contrary like that.

Okay, I'm just curious...

...but why do I keep seeing people arriving here after searching for "Lounder Yay"? It's been happening for a long time now, and it doesn't really make any sense. There's no N in my blog's name, and the word "lounder" doesn't mean anything — in English, at least. It's really, really odd. :P

Welcome to Ponyville DVD cover appears

Spike seems... quite pleased to be next to Rarity

And here it is: region 2 Pony is revealed! Thank you to MrBaBa over on UK of Equestria for alerting me to this. Its Amazon listing doesn't really tell us anything much else, but the fact that it's a one-disc release suggests that Clear Vision may well follow the Australian region 4 pattern: over there, S1 was put out on five DVDs, with the initial disc (called Friendship Changes Everything Down Under) containing the first five episodes.

The cover design is nothing special, in that it uses the same vectors we've all seen hundreds of times, but at least it's a different look to the front of the Aussie and American DVDs. If our release does follow the Australian pattern, then unfortunately there probably won't be any extras — but let's face it, MLP:FiM is a bit of a niche show over here in any case, so we should probably be grateful that we're getting R2 releases at all.